A study on effective knowledge reuse in multi-platform web applications user interfaces

With the increasing popularity of portable devices and the variety of platforms for such devices web applications correspondence to critical user requirements becomes one of the key factors in user satisfaction and application success. More and more applications are being migrated from desktop to mobile platforms. Due to the different screen resolutions and device usage behavior, user experience can be extremely different on desktop and portable devices. Flexible and responsive frameworks, mobile development guidelines and best practices are the solutions that help to migrate smoothly from one platform to another. Nevertheless, these solutions mostly do not consider enough the migration of knowledge about the application structure and navigation to a new platform. The main focus of current research is on the effective reuse of user previous experience in the context of porting the same web application onto different platforms. Web application users mostly do not need to feel any difference between application usages on different devices; for them it should be smooth and intuitive. After using a web application on a desktop device, users should be able to reuse gained experience and knowledge on a new platform, i.e., mobile platform. In this paper we show how users accustom to the same web application on different platforms. Moreover, the results demonstrate that some users apprehend the difference of application user interfaces in a way that they do not have feeling of using the same web application. For the latter, user tests with eye tracking support were performed in order to analyse the process of accustoming to the new platforms. The paper also delivers solutions to the explicit problems of adaption of web applications user interfaces.